Qt/qml for Home Automation
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Greetings from the LinuxMCE project :)
In short, LinuxMCE is an open source home automation project that plugs into your home. Lights, climate, media, telecom, security, and so much more including and on screen user interface. We embarked on a project about a year ago to update our user interface, as it was sorely stuck in an age gone by and developing new looks within its archaic setup was discouraging to most.After taking a hard look at various tool-kits, we opted to utilize Qt and QML for our user interface update for many reasons, not the least of which being the extensive system and slots system that we envisioned would work well with an event driven system such as LinuxMCE. After our sample project of creating a simulated Qt / qml device that interfaced with a system generated c++ api worked better than expected, we moved to tackle the user interface with our goal being simple: Extend control to every controllable surface in the home. This is where the cross platform (and they apparently mean it!) aspect of Qt came into play as we had multiple targets and maintaining multiple codebases was a realistic option.
Fast forward about 8 months. We are in the beta release of our Android Orbiter that utilizes necessitas to bring Qt and QML to the Android platform. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGNp1-g0jEE Is an example the entire concept of LinuxMCE, and the portability of Qt has allowed us to extend this vision to an entire new generation of devices. We currently have
-Linux X11 ,Mac OS ,Android, Windows is still in explosive alpha ;) , Harmattan , -iOS hopefully very soon according to our lead mac developer. And I would be remiss to mention the skinning engine based on qml thats designed for community input, a fan fav at the forums.Lastly, I would just like to say as a newbie programmer (started learning c++ at the beginning of the project and some how became the developer of it) the docs have been quite helpful in figuring out how to work one's way through this process. Qt is quite the awesome toolkit.
Check out the LinuxMCE project at http://www.linuxmce.org
Videos relating to development http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL80B34FB76B25586BThanks for reading!
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Nice story and project, thanks for sharing, and happy future coding :)
